Global BIPOC Advisory Board

Date:
March 19th 2022
Time:
11:00AM - 12:30 PM (GMT-8)
Meeting Length:
90 mins

Meeting 4 Minutes

  1. Roll Call

    • Aielen
    • Brainwane
    • Loup
    • Hurdy gurdy girl
  2. Approval of Previous Minutes (5 mins)

    Review/Discussions of Meeting #3 minutes.

    Minutes Approved unanimously

    • Question of Slack's purpose
      • Brainwane suggests we use slack as a side-channel for side discussion and could use it for certain announcements alongside emails.
      • Sending quick email announcements to relay that there is new information in Slack if necessary
      • Look into an email and slack integration - email mailing groups (a listserv)
    • Question about how many people we have currently - answer is currently, 5 members who have expressed their desire to be active members of the board
  3. Group Discussion for setting Achievable goals as a group
    • Member hopes that staff will consult with the group while making policy decisions and provide information. Other things that would be helpful to have access to:
      • Trends for site membership
      • Demographic data
      • Networking
      • Recruitment for new members
      • Monthly BIPOC initiatives based on information that we have that the board doesn't have
      • Some context provided by loup: As a staff, we are re-evaluating the roles and responsibilities of the team and how that looks moving forward. We need to make changes for members to feel safe, and a more prominent member of the board will help in addressing these issues. We presently do not know how to make those changes yet but that is why we are making that our priority.
    • Aielen suggests that there is a lack of transparency, gap in information due to account wipes/deleted comments. They have been compiling key suggestions in the past for the board to review that they will share with the group later.
    • Loup mentions having drafted a slowly progressing compilation of major site issues/requests/issues. But overall, there is a clear need to make major changes. How decisions are made, how we report back, the very early stages of change. There was a learning curve to learn how we can show up and make changes on the site.
    • Thyme asks for ideas around how the group imagines demographic data gathering to look like
      • Hurdy gurdy girl suggests offering a simple survey to gather very basic information.
        • Surveys with free-form answering opportunities
        • Identifying what are the few things that we really want to know, and having plenty of freeform opportunities
    • Brainwane: Free form answers may create more information for us to sift through. If there is a survey, limiting questions we have would be helpful in lessening the amount of information the researcher would need to sift through
    • Advertising analytics about the demographics of who views the ads on the site
    • Brainwane cares about trends over time, how have things changes over time in numbers and proportions of users, geographics, some info about gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity
    • Answering questions like: How many members do we have, posting and commenting frequency, reversing the contributor and participant decline, and ensuring there is stability to DEI efforts
      1. How steep is the decline in participation including all forms (reading, saving, commenting)
      2. Is there a disportionate difference between mefites of diverse demographics vs misfits of dominant demographics
    • Are there other questions that come to mind?
      • Hurdy gurdy girl - if we find that there is a decline, can we then answer WHY there is a decline? Finding out why people feel that they need to leave, how can we canvas people who aren't here anymore? Through the work that aielen has done, by looking at those threads and understanding why people are closing their accounts.
        • Loup shares that we do have some data around that
        • Aielen suggests possibly examining groups who have left to get better insight into our questions
    • Brainwane:
      • In their own work, structuring Retention and attraction according to questions of why people leave (the -1 to 100 project)
        • Conflict
        • Accessibility
      • Mefites as clusters of participation
        • Identifying different user personas as we look at data to ask additional questions
    • Loup:
      • Ways we can start to make change when we came in:
        • Data driven planning which required many work and resources
        • The other, how we reshape content, how we report back and how we make plans more visible to the community which was the clear path forward (didn't require as much resources) how we handle site updates, how we change content and guidelines policy. Loup thinks we are now at a place where we should and need to focus on data-driven planning and research now.
    • Hurdy gurdy girl
      • Happy to help and have us reach out for helping with this data-driven work
    • Brainwane
      • Expectations for the group
      • We want more data for initiatives, there is another piece which we need to talk about:
        • The reactive/proactive advisory component: we as staff come up with policies and priorities on how to spend frimble's time, brainwane asks if we could have a view and voice into that process?
        • Loup: to answer this question, thinking about roles and responsibilities clearly needing to be sorted out, taking care of technical and background work that will need to be better reported. We are hoping those responsibilities will change and therefore, consulting with you all would make a lot more sense.
    • Loup would like feedback on how we structure these meetings, better defined objectives

  4. Channel Privacy Policy and Member terms (10 mins)

    Revisiting the policy for meeting channel access and board member terms/conditions of participation.

    • Reissue roster
    • Aielen - since we are transitioning to zoom, do we have a policy around whether the zoom video calls are accessible to?
      • loup : the board needs to work in a way in which everyone wants to be comfortable, how do you all want this to show up?
      • Suggestions: Treat this recording as slack meeting records, zoom recordings are saved to the Cloud - available for 2 weeks as a sharable link. Store as a local copy so we have the shareable link in slack.
      • Aielen - do non bipoc mods have access to our meeting recording?
        • Nope! They will not have access.
      • Hurdy gurdy girl
        • Hgg finds that it will be nice to have a space going forward where if anyone in the group wants to share but doesn't want Non-bipoc mods to hear it the way they are going to say it, it would be nice to have that space.
      • Brainwane
        • There is also the option that we can take clips from the video that may be useful for non-bipoc mods to hear in the case that there is a particularly important bit.
          • Hurdy gurdy agrees and also suggests that if we do want non bipoc to join in for a bit of the meeting, they are free to do so.
      • Loup
        • Our main goal is for you to own the space, how much is said, what is said, and who has access to what is being said

  5. Board's Decision-Making/Voting Process

    How do board members want to make decisions/what sort of voting process will the board adopt?

    • Brainwane finds that we are going to do more negotiating, all of us trying to come to consensus. If there is a need for voting then we can apply that.
    • Let's revisit a voting process if we get to 5 or more members
  6. Potential discussion items for next meeting
    • How often are we meeting?
      • Loup: we had 3 meetings last year, it makes a lot more sense to increase the pace and find the right balance where there is frequency yet not too time-consuming. Loup suggests that between every month or every other month is safe. What about a month from now?
        • Folks are on board with meeting in a month
    • Brainwane
      • Wants to understand some history about past mod decisions

ADDITIONAL NOTES: N/A